A bounty was posted for the first hack on Google TV and Google upped the browser security ante by adding a sandboxed PDF reader and Flash player. Microsoft migrated 0.5 million blogs to WordPress and took a challenge to a significant patent case ruling to the Supreme Court. Further disaffection was expressed in the wake of the Oracle takeover of Sun. More holes were found in Palm's WebOS and once again faulty anti-virus updates caused problems for a large number of users.

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In the wake of the announcement that Novell had been sold Glyn Moody examined the implications. The H published our Community Calendar for December and the Kernel Log series on the 2.6.37 Linux Kernel kicked off with Part 1 on graphics.

Open Source

Microsoft reported the migration of over half a million Live Spaces blogs to the WordPress platform and took a challenge to a patents case ruling to the Supreme Court that, if successful, could benefit the future of open source.

Fallout from the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems continued to settle as the Hudson project, unhappy with Oracle's hosting infrastructure changes decided to look for a new home and a French developer, impatient with the time it was taking for Apple to move its Java code to Oracle's OpenJDK project, released his own OpenJDK for Mac OS X.

In the Linux arena, operating system vendor Red Hat strengthened its portfolio by acquiring cloud specialists Makara, prominent kernel developer Greg Koah-Hartman proposed it was time to stop talking about it and actually produce a rolling release version of openSUSE and the KDE project released update 4.5.4 of its Linux and Unix desktop manager.

Security

The GNU project's Savannah forge was taken off line after a successful SQL injection attack, Dmitry Sklyarov, famous for his prosecution under the DMCA, cracked Canon's digital image verification system and it was discovered that the source code for the ProFTPD FTP server software had been modified to include a hidden back door.

Google released a new version of its Chrome browser into the stable channel which included a built-in, sandboxed, PDF viewer, having already announced it has a developer channel version waiting in the wings which also includes a sandbox for the Adobe Flash plug-in.

Anti-virus products are becoming notorious for faulty updates and this week Kaspersky released a second attempt at a critical fix as the first one had caused high loading on some systems and an AVG update rendered computers running the 64bit version of Windows 7 unusable.